


The Sacrifices We Make

by ElegantButler



Category: Max Headroom (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-07
Updated: 2015-11-07
Packaged: 2018-04-30 11:13:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5161667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElegantButler/pseuds/ElegantButler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Murray's daughter has been in an accident and is in critical condition. Meanwhile, Bryce is dealing with bad news of his own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sacrifices We Make

Murray hated hospitals. He had hated them as long as he could remember. He hadn’t even been present for the birth of his only daughter. That was one of the reasons his wife had eventually divorced him.

Now he had to go. That same daughter he’d failed to greet properly when she came into the world was in danger of leaving it. And he would be damned if he failed to say goodbye.

Annie had been in a car accident along with her mom. Rachel herself had a fractured knee and broken wrist, but Annie had got it much worse. 

They had been curbside at the time of the accident. Annie’s seat belt had been off. She had been getting ready to get out of the car, when the speeder and fishtailed their car, sending it flying and throwing her several feet and into a store front. The glass she’d hit and withstood  
the impact far better than she had.

Her bones were mending now, and there had been fortunately no head injuries as she had hit the storefront in a crumpled heap. But there were still internal injuries, and they were severe.

He wished he’d known sooner. He didn’t speak to Rachel often and had a habit of not answering her calls. So it hadn’t been until she’d actually called him at the office, something she never did, that he realized this was more than just a demand to know why her alimony check was so late.

***

That same morning, Bryce had sat across the desk from Dr. Duncan. The network physician’s face had been careworn. It was the face of a doctor who had been news. Bryce had known what the news was. He’d been delivered the blow a few weeks earlier. 

Cancer. 

At sixteen, you weren’t supposed to get cancer. Then again, at sixteen you weren’t supposed to have a top-flight job at the best television network in the world, either. Bryce supposed this was just the universe’s way of making sure everything was properly balanced. Bryce also figured the universe could go to hell. This wasn’t fair. Not fair at all. 

He’d actually cried for a bit before reminding himself that crying would not cure him and drying his eyes. He’d spoken to the doctor about medicines that might shrink the tumor. It had been a long shot, but they’d decided on one and Bryce had been taking it ever since.

“I’m afraid the tumor has grown in size rather than get smaller,” the doctor now told him. “The pills have had no effect on it. I’m going to stop them.”

“So, how long do I have?” Bryce asked, sounding as afraid as he was.

“A month at most,” Dr. Duncan told him. “I’m sorry.”  
That had been just a few hours ago. Now, Bryce was in his studio trying to keep his mind off his impending death by reading the persona files of his fellow Network 23 employees. He found it interesting that he wanted to know so much about them he hadn’t really cared about before. Why now, he wondered, briefly. He discarded that line of thought as it brought him back to the doom he was trying to ignore for the moment. 

He opened Murray’s file. Murray never did like him very much. The man was a technophobe. Bryce often wondered why he took a job at a TV network. He never seemed comfortable in what he did. Like a nervous long-tailed cat in a rocking chair store. 

There was a note about Annie’s accident. Annie was Bryce’s age and was in critical condition. Many of her internal organs had been damaged and she was on life-support as well as other machines that functioned in their place. 

Bryce reached for the vu-phone keypad and called the medical center.

A matronly woman appeared on the screen. “What can I do for you?”

“I’d like to see if I could donate organs for a specific patient,” Bryce told her. “How would I go about doing that?”

***

Murray was at Annie’s bedside with his ex when the doctor walked in. He wished he could have given her something. A kidney. He had two after all. But his organs were too old, and he could not. It hurt him that after everything else had had failed her at, he had also failed to save her life. A father was supposed to do that for his kids. But neither him nor Rachel was organ-compatible with their teenaged daughter. 

The doctor walked in wearing an unreadable expression on her face. 

“It seems I have good news for you,” he told Murray and Rachel. “We’ve found a donor.”

Rachel was the first to look up with some hope in her eyes. “Then my baby will live?”

“We’ll begin surgery in a few hours. The operating room is currently occupied with another accident victim. But as soon as it’s cleared and cleaned we’ll begin.”

“Thank you,” Murray told him.

“Who’s the donor?” Rachel asked. “I’d like to say thank you.”

“They’re probably already dead,” Murray reminded her. “Probably a new arrival at the body bank.”

“Actually, it’s a living donor,” the doctor told them. “He just found out he’s only got a month left thanks to brain cancer.”

“So he’s opted for euthanasia?” Rachel asked, sadly. “Surely not just for Annie?”

The doctor shook her head. “He’s in a lot of pain. And there’s nothing anyone can do for him. He hides it well, but a good doctor can see that he’s suffering.”

Rachel stood up. “Where is he?” she asked. 

“I’ll take you to him,” the doctor offered.

Murray didn’t go. He knew it would be the polite thing to do. But he also didn’t want to leave his daughter alone. 

***

Bryce was seated at the window of his hospital room when Rachel walked in.

“Hi,” she said to him, a tone of sadness in her voice. It hurt her to see that he was the same age as her daughter. She wished he was older. “I’m Annie’s mother, Rachel McKenzie.”

“Bryce Lynch,” Bryce told her. “I worked with your ex-husband at Network 23. I was reading some of the employee files. That’s how I found out about Annie.”

“I wanted to thank you,” Rachel told him. “I wish none of this were happening. If fate had been kinder, maybe you and Annie…”

Bryce looked at her for a moment. He could see the sadness in her eyes. She probably figured that he and Annie might have become good friends. They were the same age after all. And she was probably right. Assuming anyone could pry Bryce away from his work long enough to actually talk to Annie.

Rachel herself had concocted a scene in her mind where Bryce would eventually marry Annie and the two would have kids and eventually even grandchildren. In a fairer world. But this world was not fair, and soon Bryce would be dead. And there was no guarantee that the surgery would be successful. Rachel hoped it would be.

“Tell me about yourself,” she implored. “I want to get to know the young man who’s doing so much for my daughter.”

Bryce talked for about half an hour. Telling her about his time at ACS, his work at the network, and his friendship with Edison, Theora, Max and even Murray.

Finally the door opened. The doctor and a nurse walked in. 

“I guess this is it,” Bryce told her. “Tell Annie I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet her.”

Rachel nodded and left the room. The last she saw of Bryce was him getting back into the bed that would soon be wheeled into the operating room where organs would be collected before he was… She stopped thinking about it. It hurt too much.

She walked into Annie’s hospital room. Murray looked up.

“What’s wrong?”

“The donor’s no older than Annie,” Rachel told him. “Just a boy.”

Murray didn’t know what to say about that, so he remained silent as she went on about her fantasy of how this boy and Annie might have been friends or even married in a better world. He let it wash over him until he heard Rachel say. “He said he worked with you.”

“Bryce,” Murray groaned. He wished he had gone to see him now. But now it was too late. Bryce was in the operating room, under anaesthesia, and… Murray didn’t want to think about it. 

He also didn’t want to think about what he was going to tell Edison or Theora. If he’d known sooner… If Bryce had told him, Murray would have insisted that they go to the hospital to say a proper goodbye.


End file.
